SYNOPSIS: In “Twisters,” a stand-alone sequel to the 1996 disaster film “Twister,” Daisy Edgar-Jones plays Kate Cooper, a meteorologist and weather whisperer who retired to the comfort of an office job following a tragic encounter with a tornado in her home state of Oklahoma. Drawn back into the world of storm chasing by the opportunity to test a groundbreaking new tornado tracking system, she returns to the field. “The worse the weather,” says her mother (Maura Tierney), “the happier the girl.” As central Oklahoma is beset by the worst tornado season in years, Kate finds herself torn between an old colleague (Anthony Ramos), a famous social media storm chaser (Glen Powell) and a shady developer (David Born).
CAST: Daisy Edgar-Jones, Glen Powell, Anthony Ramos, Brandon Perea, Maura Tierney, and Sasha Lane. Directed by Lee Isaac Chung.
REVIEW: The new movie falls somewhere between remake and sequel of the 1996 film, but those expecting a flying cow may be disappointed. The signature image from the original is nowhere to be found, but fans of airborne objects will still find much to enjoy. “Sometimes the old ways are the best ways,” says Tyler (Powell).
Director Lee Isaac Chung captures the adrenaline of storm chasing in frenetic scenes that place the characters in the middle of violent, swirling wind maelstroms. The intensity of those scenes, however, is matched only by the passionate tornado talk. Kate and Tyler enjoy a good weather-related chin wag (although there is no mention of climate change here), but the meteorologicalese tends to slow down the film’s forward momentum.
In other words, when the titular tornados are in motion, the movie is exciting. When they’re being talked about, less so.
The people doing most of the talking, Powell, Edgar-Jones and Ramos, aren’t just props with wind-blown hair. Each are given an obstacle to overcome, whether it is the weight of first impressions, the impact of trauma or the guilt that comes with selling out one’s principles. The character arcs, like Powell’s shift from reckless cowboy to cowboy scientist, a charismatic turn that gives the tornados a run for the movie’s best special effect, gives “Twisters” the opportunity for meaningful exchanges between the characters.
It’s also the rare action/disaster flick, that values brains over brawn in almost every sticky situation the characters find themselves in.
For all the character work, “Twisters” misses an opportunity with the expected, and more than hinted at, romance between Kate and Tyler. As it is their attraction that has all the heat of an Oklahoma winter’s night.
“Twisters” may not have the consistent, blustery excitement of the original, but it does deliver satisfying wet ‘n wild summer blockbuster action.
A very unusual thing happened when I saw Richard Linklater’s “Hit Man” at last year’s TIFF. After the movie’s best and funniest scene, one that shows the comedic chops and chemistry of leads Glen Powell and Adria Arjona, the audience burst into applause. It was a spontaneous, organic moment, the kind usually reserved for comedy clubs, not sold-out festival screenings.
Powell, who also wrote the script, plays Gary, a seemingly mild-mannered psychology and philosophy professor at the University of New Orleans. When he isn’t lecturing to bored students about breaking out of their comfort zones, he leads a quiet life, tending to his pet birds and two cats, Id and Ego.
On the side he works with local law enforcement as a sound technician, secretly recording undercover officer Jasper (Austin Amelio) as he entraps people who want to hire him to kill a spouse or a business partner.
When Jasper is suspended for bad behavior, Gary subs in.
Turns out, he’s a natural, and more importantly, it gives him an adrenaline rush he hasn’t felt for many years. With Jasper out of the picture, Gary dives in, wearing disguises to create a new hitman character for every meeting.
“I realized not everyone fantasized about the same hit man,” he says. “Every sting operation was a performance. And each arrest was like a standing ovation.”
When he meets Madison (Adria Arjona), a distressed wife who wants him to kill her husband, he immediately falls for her. In their meeting he gets her to stop talking before she incriminates herself, and soon, they begin dating. Trouble is, she knows him as self-assured badass Ron, not as the affable Gary.
Complications ensue, culminating in the above-mentioned applause-worthy scene, a mix of slapstick and the pure chemistry between Powell and Arjona, where they know the police are recording them, but continue their conversation as though they don’t.
Very loosely based on the true story of Gary Johnson, as written by Skip Hollandsworth in “Texas Monthly,” “Hit Man” is a rom com with some thrilling twists. Light and frothy, it’s anchored by a smart script that acts as a showcase for the lead performances.
Powell pulls off a full-on leading man turn as a guy who embodies an ideal by creating a role-playing fantasy of what a hit man would be like, based on the wants and needs of the client. It gives him a chance to show his versatility and step away from the bland leading man roles that have marked some of his most popular work to date.
“Hit Man” makes the most of that performance. As the disguises get nuttier and nuttier, and the plot more pretzel-shaped, director Richard Linklater finds a balance between Powell’s showcase work, the script’s big laughs and the story’s inherent tension. It could have gone south very easily, but Linklater pulls off a bit of a magic trick and keeps it hilariously humming along on all cylinders.
It’s been thirty-six years, but movie goers can once again ride into the danger zone.
Kind of.
Hotheaded test pilot Pete “Maverick” Mitchell (Tom Cruise) returns to the screen and sky in the high-flying sequel “Top Gun: Maverick,” which, despite the main character’s feats of daring do, plays it mostly by-the-book.
When we first get reacquainted with Captain Maverick, he’s still the hotshot, risky pilot we remember from the first film. His cocky attitude and bad boy behavior has kept him from being promoted. “I’m where I belong,” he says when asked why he’s not an Admiral after decades of distinguished service. He’s popular with his peers but not with the brass, save for his old friend and guardian angel, Admiral Tom “Iceman” Kazansky (Val Kilmer in an extended cameo).
“Your reputation precedes you,” says Vice Admiral Beau “Cyclone” Simpson (Jon Hamm). “That’s not a compliment.”
Called back to Top Gun, the United States Navy training program where he learned fighter and strike tactics and technique, Maverick is presented with a last chance for glory. “You fly for Top Gun or you don’t ever fly for the Navy again.”
Cyclone is obviously disdainful of the arrogant Maverick, but acknowledges he is the best person to train twelve of the brightest and best recent Top Gun graduates for a dangerous mission to locate and destroy an underground uranium enrichment site.
For Maverick, the job comes with baggage. It places him in the vicinity of on-again, off-again girlfriend Penny (Jennifer Connelly), a new character, referenced in the first film as the daughter of an admiral. Most dramatically, one of his students is Lieutenant Bradley “Rooster” Bradshaw (Miles Teller), the son of Maverick’s late best friend, “Goose,” played by Anthony Edwards in the first film. Rooster holds Maverick responsible for his father’s death and is resistant to Maverick’s training. “My dad believed in you,” he says. “I’m not going to make the same mistake.”
Of the twelve recruits, half will make the cut, one will be the leader, if Maverick can teach them the precision and “Don’t think, just do” attitude needed to come home alive.
“Top Gun: Maverick” screenwriters Ehren Kruger, Eric Warren Singer and Christopher McQuarrie keep the story simple; a splash of romance, a dash of remorse, some shirtless volleyball and a mountain of eye-popping aerial action. It’s a recipe that echoes the events of the first film to the point of déjà vu. Still, as an exercise in nostalgia, complete with callbacks to the original, and an emotional appearance by Kilmer, “Maverick” works because it blends old and new in a crowd-pleasing way. Unlike other recent 1980s and 1990s reboots, it salutes the original in tribute. Loud and proud, it wears its superficiality on its sleeve in an old fashioned, last century style that is unabashed fan service.
But what really sets the new and old films apart is Cruise. He was a movie star then, and he’s a movie star now, but with age, the stakes for his character are higher. Maverick has a lot to prove, regrets to be dealt with and while the actor doesn’t appear to have aged at all, that trademarked Tom Cruise Run can’t be as easy as it once was. Maverick is a still a hotshot, but here the character is tempered by the sins of the past and a real concern for the future. Cruise’s work shaves some of the hypermasculine edges off Maverick to reveal a more human and humane character than the first time around. It centers the movie with some earthbound emotion to counter the sky-high action.
“Top Gun: Maverick” is a sequel that plays it safe with the story, but lets it rip in the blockbuster action sequences, giving the audience the expected need for speed.
Richard Linklater’s new film Everybody Wants Some!! is set in that sweet spot between Saturday Night Fever and the Reagan Years. Ripe with feathered hair, bell bottom pants and milk crates used as LP storage, it’s the story of college life over the course of one weekend in 1980 set to the throbbing beat of disco and new wave music.
“It was a raunchy time,” says Linklater. “It was pretty hedonistic. Sex, drugs and rock and roll. I had to impose that back on my cast. Disco was sex. Dancing was foreplay. You were hoping to keep it going and that it would get personal. The humour was really raunchy. It was not innocent but there was a certain kind of playfulness to it.”
The fifty-five year old director calls the 1980s “a good time for me. A good time to be in your twenties. I was that guy who took his album collection and his music and his speakers off to college. My entire net worth at that age was in music.”
“You do a movie to examine your feelings or what you think,” he says. “I thought a lot about my own life at that time and also the culture. It’s my little anthropological look [at 1980]. I came out of it thinking that was the end of something. The eighties got much more serious. There was the AIDS epidemic but also there was the cultural backlash. There was the Reagan administration, Pat Robertson, [Jerry] Falwell and it kind of a war and not only a war on drugs. They were trying to move the culture back to the fifties or some mythical past before all this corruption, i.e. the freedoms of the sixties, women’s liberation. That was really in full gear by 82, 83 so I look at this and think, this was the last time there was that unabashed, raunchy hedonistic pure fun. I look at it and go, that was a good time to be young because that was all going to change.”
The Texas born filmmaker says he spent his 80s college years underground, immersed in punk rock. “It was getting kind of ugly in accepted culture so I zoned out a lot of it.” Since then he has made a career chronicling contemporary suburban culture in films like Slacker, Dazed and Confused and most recently in the twelve-years-in-the-making Boyhood. Along the way he’s learned a thing or two about how society is changing.
“I think the culture has actually changed less and less,” he says. “I observed that on Boyhood. I thought the world would look a lot different in those twelve years. If you take 1969 to 1981 you got a lot of different looks, cars, everything. In Boyhood nothing changed. The phones changed but the cars all looked the same, the hairstyles. I think we’ve hit a wall. Technology is so quick moving that it satisfies that desire in us for change. Punk comes out of [the idea] that I want something new. I don’t think humans don’t feel that deep need for demonstrable rejection of the old and embracing of the new because they feel there is so much being satisfied technologically. Whatever urge that was to stick a safety pin in your cheek and go create a new dance, you don’t see that anymore.”
Director Richard Linklater’s last film, the Oscar wining “Boyhood,” was a slice of life that showcased twelve years in the life of a growing boy. His new movie is also a slice of life but in a much-condensed form, spanning just three days in the life of a college baseball player.
It’s 1980 and when we first meet Jake (Blake Jenner) driving toward the next phase of his life, college. In the backseat are a small bag of clothes and a milk carton filled with his favourite LPs. Arriving just three days before classes start, he bonds with his teammates over KISS pinball machines, longneck Lone Star beers and boings filled with Maui Waui. They party, talk baseball, play a more violent version of Rock! Paper! Scissors! called “knuckles” and try and meet girls as the clock ticks down to the first day of classes.
Largely conflict free, this isn’t a story so much as it is a snapshot of a time and place. It’s a transport back to the time of waterbeds, “My Sharona,” fashionable mullets and trippy Carl Sagan cosmology. Linklater recreates the freewheeling feel of the era and the last blast of childhood before the responsibilities of adulthood. The temptation will be to label this a more innocent time, but that isn’t exactly accurate. These guys are just as interested in scoring with girls as they are soring runs on the field so innocent they are not. At most this is an affectionately nostalgic glimpse back into our recent past.
“Everybody Wants Some!!” is a charming reminiscence. Linklater gets the details right—including a crude warning against the pleasures of waterbed sex—but more importantly populates the film with characters that feel like real people and not stereotypes conjured up by a 1980s way-back machine. It’s troubling that the female characters are given little to do—perhaps Linklater’s next could be from the point of view of the woman’s experience—but the men are entertaining and compelling sorts whose conversations are occasionally inane, occasionally philosophical, just like real life.
In the last shot of “Everybody Wants Some!!”Jake watches his professor scrawl “Frontiers Are Where You Find Them” on the blackboard. The film doesn’t bother with its character’s boundaries, choosing instead to introduce to them as they are beginning the searching for their frontiers. The movie and its characters live in the moment, and that’s a pretty fun place to be.
